


i seek to hold you, in sunshine or rain

by eynn



Series: had a dream, you and me in the war of the end times [11]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Mentions of Past Rape/Noncon, Nobody Dies, Time Travel Fix-It, also like anakin grew up as a slave and he relates to the clones on a level most of the others don't, anakin is still a bit Oblivious, anakin's just worried about his family, but obi-wan finally figures out what's going on, discussion of the emotional trauma of order 66, he's their superpowered big brother who wants to go kick some abusers out of an airlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27297817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn
Summary: Overall, Anakin thinks he’s doing very well.The Jedi weren’t all dead, he was going to tie Sidious up and read him the most excruciatingly dull pod mechanic manuals he could find until he died of boredom (well, boring to Sidious. Anakin thought they were very interesting) and then set his corpse on fire and dance on it, Padmé was alive and their children were too, Obi-Wan didn’t actually hate him or think he was a delinquent brat, and Ahsoka was back with him.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Series: had a dream, you and me in the war of the end times [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1713040
Comments: 49
Kudos: 809





	i seek to hold you, in sunshine or rain

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to ValkyrieNyght for giving me the sneaky idea that anakin slammed the reboot button so hard that he brought other people back in time too, just not quite as dramatically. i was stuck about three thousand words into this for literally a week but that idea knocked something loose again! it's not quiiiiite what you said, but i love the idea anyway

Overall, Anakin thinks he’s doing very well.

The Jedi weren’t all dead, he was going to tie Sidious up and read him the most excruciatingly dull pod mechanic manuals he could find until he died of boredom (well, boring to Sidious. Anakin thought they were very interesting) and then set his corpse on fire and dance on it, Padmé was alive and their children were too, Obi-Wan didn’t actually hate him or think he was a delinquent brat, and Ahsoka was back with him.

Not to mention, he had already saved so many of his brothers compared to the first time around. By now, Ahsoka would have had her first real experience of a fight with a Sith, they’d have picked up the _Twilight_ , and the death toll for the vod’e would make it absolutely inexcusable to do that again.

Even if he did miss the _Twilight_.

Anyway, he really didn’t want to go back to Tatooine or do the Hutts any favors. If he was going back to talk to the Hutts, he was going to do it from a tank and with missile launchers backing him up.

And it wasn’t fair to Ahsoka to just fling her off the deep end from the relative safety of the Temple straight into a literal active warzone. Anakin glares at the stars outside the viewport, remembering the way she had been sent out to him with no warning, just another piece of supplies along with the ammunition and rations.

 _Yeah, the Council needed a kick up the ass,_ he grumbles to himself under his breath. _Idiots._ Children technically _could_ take on the responsibilities of adults and act like adults, he knew that all too well, but it wasn’t healthy and it didn’t mean they’d turn out to be sane and well-adjusted members of adult society once they really were adults.

Case in point, himself.

And Padmé.

And Obi-Wan.

He glances over at Rex, who’s been following him around all day every day since he arrived. Came back. Yote himself through time to fix his mistakes. Whatever.

Since Christophsis.

He doesn’t remember Rex being quite so clingy the first time around, but he very well might have been. It has been a long, long time since the war had started, since he had married Padmé.

Rex wore his helmet a lot more than he remembered, but that was probably a friendship thing. He has to keep reminding himself that even though he knows Rex, Rex doesn’t know him. So even if he knows that Rex actually hates wearing his helmet while he’s on board a ship, maybe Rex himself hasn’t figured that out yet.

It had taken a while for the vod’e to shake off the ridiculous social training the Kaminoans had taught them, and the Jedi’s own nervousness and unfamiliarity with running military operations that had more than four participants at the most hadn’t helped with that the first time around.

He winces, remembering the awful blunders they had all made for the first year or so of the war, before getting used to working as a team and not as a solo ninja stealth shadow of death who happened to have a few hundred people frantically trying to keep up behind them while in full armor, and stares out at the stars some more.

Looking at Rex’s helmet is kind of depressing. It doesn’t have the same personality as it had the last time he had seen the older Rex.

This time around, he wasn’t going to try to make war a fun childhood for Ahsoka. He was going to actually give her a fun childhood, and if a war happened to lurk around the corners of it, he was going to stand there and glare it away.

He’d glared time into folding back for him, surely he could send a few armies of dumbass battledroids running for the hills.

So far they’ve been perfectly safe hiding in this nebula, floating on the edge where rough space meets the more civilized inner parts.

Rex is starting to worry him, though. He is always there. _Surely that can’t be healthy?_ Anakin wonders. I _didn’t tell him to constantly follow me around, did I? I don’t think I did. I can’t see myself doing that. And he’s so . . . jumpy. He was never like that before, even in the before before._

He surreptitiously sneaks another look at Rex out of the corner of his eye. He’s just standing there, unmoving, almost at attention. Normally, he’s always moving if he’s on his feet, even if it’s just working on a datapad or scowling at something right alongside him. Normally, he’d be off somewhere else getting things done or off somewhere else actually having a life.

Anakin blinks. His own sleep schedule, along with Padmé’s and Obi-Wan’s, is all over the place due to time travel space-lag, even though it’s been at least two tendays since they came back. Having the babies to take care of hasn’t exactly helped them normalize it, he admits, and Obi-Wan is prone to getting distracted and just walking out of rooms to go find Cody whenever he senses that he’s unhappy, which is an awful lot, no matter what time of ship’s day or night it is.

Half the time he doesn’t even think he’s intentionally reaching out to him, it’s just so ingrained in him by now that he does it automatically. Anakin closes his eyes and clenches his hands as he realizes just how badly that Order 66 must have messed with everyone’s minds, Jedi and vod’e alike. If even half the generals had half the bond that they had . . .

Obi-Wan had flatly refused to talk about it with him. His eyes went far away and glassy every time it came up in their planning to stop it, and it frightened Anakin.

 _I was too far gone to feel anything,_ he thinks, taking deep shuddering breaths, _but I know how it felt when Padmé was dying. When I almost killed her. And I was prepared, I did that deliberately. To have it just happen suddenly . . ._

That’s another thing they need to talk about. She had already shushed him when he tried to apologize for Mustafar, telling him that his actions had been more Sidious puppeteering his body than he himself acting of his own free will, but he knows exactly how much of it had been him and it’s more than she will let herself believe.

Behind him, Rex shifts abruptly.

Anakin opens his eyes and deliberately relaxes his hands, wrinkling his nose in irritation as he sees that his nails have gouged into the skin in a few places again. The pain grounds him. He knows it’s not healthy, but what is, anymore?

He’d almost destroyed the world. A few days of scraped palms hardly seems like any kind of penance.

There is a clatter and a thud behind him, and he whirls around, one foot going back to brace himself as his hand goes to his lightsaber, ready to attack, but he sees only Rex sprawled across the deck at his feet and the vod’e working on the bridge staring at him, frozen.

He waves awkwardly. “Sorry, I’m a bit jumpy today. Never mind me,” he apologizes, and they turn back to their stations slowly, almost like they’re reluctant to turn their backs on him.

Anakin kneels beside Rex and reaches out to undo the latches on his helmet, rolling his eyes. It appears that some things are always a constant, and Rex being able to fall asleep standing up at the weirdest times is one of them.

As his fingers press the releases, he notes that Rex isn’t waking up like he usually does if Anakin or Ahsoka don’t catch him. With a sudden rush of worry, he tugs the helmet off and slides his hands under his captain’s shoulders, rolling him over to rest his head in his lap and running gentle fingers through his short hair.

He isn’t used to it being quite this short. As the war went on, the vod’e simply didn’t have time to maintain the fuzzy almost-bald haircuts the Kaminoans had given them all, and as they got further and further away from Kamino, some of them developed elaborate and beautiful personal styles of their own.

Rex just didn’t bother getting a haircut unless it got in his way.

“Hey, vod, wake up,” he says with a laugh, shaking Rex’s shoulders just a little. “C’mon, let’s get you to bed if you’re so sleepy.”

Rex doesn’t move.

Anakin leans over him and examines his upside-down face, worry beginning to sink like a cold stone in his abdomen. Is he sick? Is he injured? Did someone just try to take a shot at him and hit Rex by mistake?

There are dark patches under his eyes. Anakin pushes at the high collar of the armor, feeling for a pulse; it’s unusually shallow and fast, thrumming like a bird under his fingers.

“Not now, not like this, not when I’ve only just got you back,” he whispers, reaching out to pull him up, half-sitting limp in his arms. “We have so much to do, there are so many things I want to show you, you haven’t even started to realize how amazing you are.”

A pair of feet come into his narrowing vision, and he sucks in a breath and looks up.

“Cody!” Anakin says with relief. “Something happened, he just fell over, I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Is he sick? Did he get hurt? He won’t wake up.”

Cody kneels beside him, moving stiffly – is he hurt too? – and reaches out, almost lifting Rex completely from Anakin’s grip before he realizes what’s happening and gives a yelp of protest, snatching him back and hugging him to his chest.

“No, I’ve got him, I’ll take care of him, I just – is it safe to move him? Do you know what happened?”

Cody stays where he is, frozen, then slowly pulls his arms back. “No, sir.”

“I didn’t do anything, I swear.” Anakin registers the supreme _weirdness_ of being called ‘sir’ by Cody and pauses a moment to sort that in his head.

Right, time travel. Cody isn’t his ba’vodu yet. Can’t ground him for being an asshole to Rex, even if he started it. Probably won’t tell on him to Obi-Wan, either.

Still, weird.

“Uh, medical?” he says, shifting his weight in order to pick Rex up and stand up at the same time.

Cody nods.

Anakin stands up and gathers Rex in his arms. Cody picks up his discarded helmet and follows him through the corridors.

Something feels wrong. It’s making his sense of danger itch and he finds himself stepping lightly, angling his body as he comes up to corners. Watching behind himself for someone to appear.

He reaches out with the Force, but it comes back to him as calmly as ever. There is no immediate danger to the ships or to anyone on board them, yet some instinct is telling him to be ready to run.

Run, not fight, he realizes as he sets Rex down gently on a cot and looks around for a medic, and then he recognizes the feeling. It’s an old one, all the way back from his childhood. The same tingle of wariness he learned to use to keep himself and his mother safe when the slave auctions were being held or Watto was angry with them.  
He closes his eyes, standing with his back to the wall, one hand unobtrusively ready to draw his lightsaber and the other holding Rex’s shoulder, and reaches out with the Force again for the source of this disturbance.

He picks up on Obi-Wan first, as always, doing something up in one of the sleeping areas and feeling faintly outraged and sad as he has been since coming back and really noticing how shitty the living areas for the vod’e are. Then Padmé, sleepy and content, and their children, also sleeping. Ahsoka, breathless and adrenaline up; she’s running hand-to-hand combat drills with some of the brothers in one of the practice areas, but she’s also laughing, as are the faint flickers that are the brothers with her. Rex, exhausted and stressed with a tinge of desperate protectiveness even in unconsciousness. Cody –

Anakin wrenches his senses back in and slams his shields up. For a moment he is four again, screaming in his mother’s arms as the miasma of the yearly slave market really hits him for the first time in his life and he feels all their terror and pain and misery and their minds reliving all the bad things that have ever happened to them and he has no words for it and can’t figure out how to shield out that much emotion and there is nothing he can do but hide his face in his mother’s hair and wail.

Dimly, he feels Obi-Wan jerk to attention and then send a faint pulse of worried reassurance mixed with ‘be there in a second’, but mostly he is concentrating on matching up the things he was used to sensing from the vod’e to the things he is actually sensing from them, and it turns out that the two things do not match at _all_.

No wonder he’s been dreaming of Tatooine since he came back.

 _It’s not their fault, it’s not their fault, you know that Sidious is a sadistic monster and he created this army, of course he do horrible things to them, give his friends power over them, there’s nothing you could have done before now, no one ever knew the first time around and this is your chance to start the slave revolution right here right now,_ he tells himself.

It helps, but not much.

And what Obi-Wan sees when he comes running to medical and slides into the room is: Rex on a cot, unnaturally pale, Anakin huddled on the floor beside him, still clinging to his hand, and Cody standing at the foot of the cot, Rex’s helmet in his hands.

“What happened?” Obi-Wan asks, giving Anakin a gentle poke and receiving a small one back, sighing in relief. Whatever is going on, Anakin just needs a few moments to work through it and he will be fine.

He takes a step forward to try to help Rex and finds his path blocked by Cody.

Cody, who has set down Rex’s helmet very gently on the floor and removed his own, setting it beside it. Obi-Wan tilts his head quizzically, looking up at him, and then frowns.

“It’s my fault,” Cody says, and he frowns some more.

“What do you mean, my dear?”

Anakin visibly flinches behind them and shakes his head. Obi-Wan looks between him and Cody.

“It’s my fault, General. I – It’s my fault. I told him to. Not. It’s my responsibility. Please don’t blame him.”

~

Cody, Obi-Wan thinks as he draws up plans for making their ships more of a home and less of a military transport that happens to include places people can sleep, is acting strangely.

It worries him.

It had taken time and several battles for them to really start working together fluidly, and even longer before they became any closer than casual friends. Still, that was only to be expected. Besides the awkwardness of military rank, the vod’e had no real examples of traditional family units to base any expectations on.

Still, they had loved each other.

The last thing he had felt along their bond before it was shattered by Sidious’ mind control had been a bright haze of panic that had been quickly overwhelmed by a desperate, wordless plea of _I love you, forgive me_.

It would no doubt take time for Cody to become friends with him again this time, but every second of it would be worth it if they could stop Order 66 from happening. Even if they never became more than friends.

It is hard to remember that, though, when he is right there in front of him and he can still feel the brush of his mind alongside his; a little different, not quite as unguarded, definitely not as sparklingly creative (but that would come with time and unlearning the narrow thinking patterns that had been trained into them all), a little more naïve and not quite as quick to see the morbid humor in a situation.

But it was still Cody, and if he could . . . speed along the friendship process by being friendly instead of politely aloof like he had started out the first time, he would certainly try it.

The thing where he picked up on Cody’s nightmares and went to reassure him that he was still alive had to stop, though. It was just awkward and uncomfortable for everyone, but he couldn’t help it.

There wasn’t even anyone he could talk to about it. Anakin and Padmé had come back together and nobody else had lived through the war. Anakin and Padmé had each other. Obi-Wan had the ghost of his past and the ghost of a potential future.

He realizes that he has been staring sightlessly at his datapad for the last twenty minutes when a ripple goes through the Force and he feels Anakin having some kind of meltdown.

Going to see what the problem is is more constructive than sketching plans for a little house somewhere on an isolated planet that had never seen war where he could live in peace with someone who didn’t exist anymore, so he gets up and goes to help.

Surprisingly, Anakin is in the medbay. Rex is lying on one of the cots, still fully armored except for his helmet, but Anakin is huddled beside him and holding his hand.

Obi-Wan’s heart does that _stupid_ fluttery thing that it does every single time when he sees Cody. He’s standing at the foot of the cot, still protecting Rex and Anakin even though they barely know each other.

At least, he barely knows Anakin. He’s pretty sure that Rex and Cody knew each other before they were assigned to their battalions and ended up working together so much.

That was something he never really talked about with him. He knew almost nothing of what Cody’s life had been like before he met him. Maybe this time around they could actually talk about their pasts instead of just clutching at each other for sanity and comfort while stuck in a seemingly endless war.

“What happened?” he asks, poking Anakin’s shields and getting one back. He turns his attention to Cody, knowing that Anakin is just fine for now and doesn’t need help other than knowing that he’s there if he is needed.

Cody takes off his helmet and sets it down next to Rex’s on the floor, and it’s so strange to see him wearing it while not on a battlefield, when it’s just them, that he’s distracted by his thoughts for a few moments. Then he looks up into Cody’s face.

One of the things he loves about the man is his amazing sabacc face. He can almost bluff better than Obi-Wan can himself. For a few months when they had first met, he had thought that he honestly could not show emotions at all.

Now? He looks terrified.

“It’s my fault,” he says, and Obi-Wan’s heart breaks a little. Was he play-sparring with Rex and hurt him somehow?

“What do you mean, my dear?”

He’s tried to stop doing that, but it just slips out. And he looks so scared.

Would this Cody still feel safe if he held him and let him bury his face in his shoulder? Or would a hug still be inappropriate at this point?

A movement catches his eye – Anakin is shaking his head.

“It’s my fault, General. I – It’s my fault. I told him to. Not. It’s my responsibility. Please don’t blame him.”

“Told him to what?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that Cody’s free hand is trembling. The other is gripping the rail of Rex’s cot so hard the cheap metal is bending.

“To – I should have – It’s my fault. I should have taken care of it instead of making him do it.”

Obi-Wan is still confused. Cody is getting more and more panicked and Anakin is still dealing with one of his amplified Force-fits. And then there’s Rex.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s not been – Sir. Watching the door while. I’ve broken regulations and been staying in his quarters.”

So that’s why he hasn’t been having as many nightmares lately, Obi-Wan thinks, and smiles a little.

“What’s wrong with that?” he says, trying to sound neutral. “We share quarters all the time.”

“I can’t – he has to stay awake while I’m there to keep watch or else I can’t relax and then he doesn’t sleep and he’s my –” Cody snaps his mouth shut and leans back a little as Obi-Wan unthinkingly reaches out to him. “Please. He’s the only one I have left. It’s all my fault, I deserve the punishment. He was only following orders.”

“Orders?”

“I shouldn’t have run away from you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. You can do anything you want to me, I’ll do anything, I won’t resist.”

“I’d never hurt you, cy – I’d never hurt any of you,” he says helplessly. “I’d never do anything you don’t want me to. I know you don’t like – some things, and that’s just fine. I don’t either. I never knew your reasons, but I don’t have to know before I can respect your boundaries.”

Cody kneels at his feet.

“What’s wrong?” Obi-Wan says a little desperately, sinking down to sit across from him, knees almost touching, hands hovering between them as he fights the desire to put them on Cody’s shoulders, brush the unruly curls away from where they have fallen as he bows his head. “What is upsetting you so?”

He settles for lying his hands on his knees, palms up. “Please, tell me just the outline of the problem is, Cody. I don’t understand why you are so upset but I can feel it and I want to help.”

The waves of _grieffearnotagainnomoreno_ that he can feel pouring from his mind are overwhelmed by a peculiar sort of terrified blankness that he has only felt a few times in his life – from very, very young initiates who have not figured out any other kind of shield, and that’s interesting for all the questions it raises – as soon as he says ‘I can feel it’.

“I’m not trying to get into your mind,” he says slowly, cautiously. “You’re projecting rather loudly, I’m afraid. I am more attuned to you in particular than any of your brothers, but that is because we worked so closely together for so long. I’m not trying to attack you or hurt you. I want to help. I don’t understand why you are so afraid and – I think we are talking at cross purposes here,” he adds as a slow realization dawns on him. “What do you think I am going to do to you?”

“You can see my thoughts,” Cody says, still curled into himself and kneeling in front of him.

“Only if you allow me to,” Obi-Wan says, smiling faintly as memories of dull missions and boring negotiations only made bearable by them doing just that come into his head. “Only if you want.”

He feels anxiety, a flash of defiant misery, and then his mind is flooded with memories, touches and words and orders crawling over him as he watches from above like it’s someone else’s body they’re doing that to and that is doing what’s ordered and afterwards as he hides beneath his bunk with what bandages and disinfectant he can steal without being noticed and tries to wash off the blood and the – other things that cling sticky to his skin and worry about where to find yet another set of clothes to replace the ones that are torn and filthy now and he won’t be able to bear even seeing them again and what if the real officer he’s given to expects the same and what if it never ends, what if he’s not enough and they move on to his brothers that they aren’t already using –

He slams his shields up and twists away in time to find a trash can to throw up into instead of messing up the floor.

Anakin has perked up a little and is staring at him in worried confusion.

“Sidious sent trainers to Kamino,” he says hoarsely. “And they don’t think they’re people, just slaves, Anakin, and they –”

He turns his head and buries his face in Anakin’s shoulder as he crawls over to sit beside him, carefully giving Cody space. He’s still on the floor himself, unmoving. Awaiting punishment, he realizes.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says into Anakin’s shoulder, still too thin from so long on the front lines, the cloth of his shirt too clean and new for so long at war. “I’m not going to do any of that to you, Cody, or any of the others. Never. That’s – that’s the most _abhorrent_ –”

He feels Anakin nudge against his mind again, presenting a quick series of images and sensations that he somehow knows were from his time before he came to the Temple. None of them are pleasant and some of them are close enough to what Cody has just shown him that he has to twist his fingers in Anakin’s sleeve and swallow hard. He nods.

“Did you – not to you, too,” he whispers.

“Not me,” Anakin says darkly. “But mom, a few times, or it would have been me. And some things, you just . . . saw. They were accepted there. If you were just a slave. There’s a reason I don’t like child abusers and rapists and the scum that trail behind them. I – I know how lucky I am that they never got me and I still hate myself for not just taking it and letting – There’s a reason I kill them when I find them. Not just to kill.”

Cody has relaxed, just a fraction. He’s still frightened and desperately protective, but he’s no longer as close to collapsing from sheer stress as he had been.

“None of that shit happens to anyone under my watch,” Anakin says, and Obi-Wan knows that he’s looking at Cody. “I don’t beat people or rape people or hurt them for fun. Padmé doesn’t. Obi-Wan doesn’t. If anyone on these ships does they are out. No excuses. And I won’t have anyone blame their victims either. The victims are never at fault. It’s not like we ask for it.”

“No more?” Cody asks, and it’s a whisper.

“No more,” Anakin confirms, nodding. “Absolutely not. Fuck. Where are those sithspawned wastes of breath that did that to you? Do you want their heads or something as a trophy or would you rather I just threw them into an incinerator?”

He can’t see Cody’s response, but a quiet, tiny feeling almost like a giggle brushes against his shields.

“Toss them out an airlock?”

Again, a quiet furtive sense of amusement.

“Choke them to death? I’m serious, ba’vodu, what should I do to them? I’m not taking any of the vod’e with me, of course, but Obi-Wan – hey, you want to come hunt some sadistic abusers? –”

He nods.

“Me and Obi-Wan, and I should take Ahsoka, it’ll be good practice for her. We’ll go wipe them out. Just point me in the right direction.”

“I thought you weren’t going to let Ahsoka fight,” he chides into Anakin’s shoulder and then grumbles as he shrugs, dislodging him.

“I don’t _want_ her to fight, especially not command a battle, but she does need to know the skillset if she’s going to survive this war. And I know she’ll be amazing at it, she just needs the practice.”

“That’s true. I should start teaching her jar’kai sooner this time, too.” He sits up and scrubs at his eyes.

Cody is sitting up now, no longer cringing. He looks wary, but there is a openness to his face that has not been there since he met him again.

“I mean it. If you tell me to stop, I will stop. If you tell me no, I will listen. I’m _trying_ not to come running every time you have a nightmare, but it’s –” he waves his hands “— it’s instinctual by now. You can shout at me or push me away or, or get a broom and smack me out the door or anything to get me to stop. I won’t punish you or any of your brothers. Never. I won’t be angry.”

He feels Cody’s mind reach out to his again, curious and intent, and lets him push and examine the words to feel the truth behind them. Then, unexpectedly, he feels him find the hole in his mind where their bond had been once, before Sidious, and grab hold of it and _look_.

“Oh,” says Cody, as he involuntarily gets a lifetime’s worth of memories of trust and respect and affection-that-became-love and softness and home and concern, and he looks blank as he reaches out towards him with his hands.

Obi-Wan meets him halfway, and they cling to each other there on the floor of the medbay at the foot of Rex’s cot.

Anakin watches them in confusion, head tilted and ready to spring to his feet and run for help.

“I remember,” Cody says, eyes shut, forehead pressed to his. “I remember – the cliff. You fell. It was so dark and so cold and you were falling away –”

“I’m here, I’m here, we’re safe,” Obi-Wan says, trying to pull him closer despite the armor and wrapping him up and around in the Force for good measure. “We’ll get the chip out right away. That’s never happening again. We’re going to change everything, cyar’ika. This is going to be amazing.”


End file.
